NBA 2K15: What’s Wrong With The Suns?

With the 2015 NBA Draft approaching, we’ve had a lot of analysis and stories coming up, and I thought it might be nice for a little change of pace. After all, this time, along with the trade deadline, is one of the most stressful periods of the year for NBA general managers, and it can be pretty stressful for fans too.

And that doesn’t stop with the draft. It only gets amplified.

Fun stuff!

So with that in mind, I decided to write this piece as something thought provoking, and as something to kind of take everyone’s mind off the serious stuff, at least for the moment. And it’s only fitting — with the NBA 2K16 release date confirmation coming less than a week ago — that we take one last look at revisiting the team on the 2K15 version, before the game is out of date.

Now before I get started I must confess, I am not what you would describe as a hardcore gamer, and I’m not the type of person that will sit and spend a whole day playing NBA 2K15 on my XBox. I rarely play online, and aside from playing with friends, I don’t really play the game all that much.

However, what I do know is this:

The way a team appears in a video game says a lot about the perception around the team. Even now, in an age where ratings are set based off statistics and measurements are down to the inch (or I guess pixel), there are always things that tell you a little bit about how a player is viewed. I like to use the example of clutch ratings to explain this.

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Nowadays, thanks to the wonderful people over at NBA.com, we have FREE access to statistics like field goal percentage in the last 30 seconds in the fourth quarter of one-possession games, and we can use statistics like this to find out who the truly clutch players in the NBA are. However, a designer doesn’t need to look at things like this to simply give out something like the 2K15 Closer Badge to a player like Kobe Bryant, who is generally known as one of the NBA’s best closers, whether or not his numbers have ever reflected that he is, in fact, clutch.

Let’s stay with this specific example.

The description of the Closer Badge is pretty simple as far as NBA 2K15 is concerned. It states on the game that the badge is given to a player who “steps his game up in the fourth quarter and overtime when the game is close.”

Well, what if I were to tell you that in his career, Bryant has shot just 2510-of-5934 (42.3 percent) from the field in the fourth quarter, and just 477-of-1533 (31.1 percent) from three. Compare those numbers to his normal averages of 45.1 percent from the field and 33.4 percent from three and we know, statistically, that Bryant does not become some unstoppable scorer in the fourth quarter, but rather he gets a little bit WORSE, if anything.

Compare that to a guy like LeBron James.

This year, LeBron shot 48.6 percent from the field in the fourth quarter, which is better than any season Kobe Bryant has ever had. He also shot 34.5 percent from three, which is better than Bryant in all but two seasons of his career. And it’s worth noting that this was a down season for LeBron. In fact, field goal percentage wise, it was the worst he’s had since the 2008-09 season.

Yet somehow, the perception used to be that LeBron couldn’t close out games, while Kobe was Mr. Clutch.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m definitely not trying to take on all the Kobe fans in the world, and I’m absolutely not trying to take part in any Kobe-LeBron-MJ-whatever argument, but I think it is important to note the perception that comes in something as simple in a video game, which for me, at least, is pretty interesting.

With that, I present to you the list of things I would change about the Suns on NBA 2K15:

Next: Honorable Mention